


plywood astroturf for a happy place

by MamaWeeds



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: 90s au sort of, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, alice is psychic-ish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28924236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MamaWeeds/pseuds/MamaWeeds
Summary: August 1997Mary Alice Brandon catches a bit of luck-- something nearly unheard of for weird backcountry girl in the boonies of Mississippi. There was a girl-- she was seeing her, she was there. A girl like her, maybe, a not-girl. Boy’s clothes and a bad attitude.She's just gotta survive long enough to get to her.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Bella Swan
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	plywood astroturf for a happy place

August 1997

Between the soft-solid, sweat cooled knees of her mother, Mary Alice Brandon received what was her fifth haircut in the last year. 

The hum of the clippers always scares her just a little, buzzing the cartilage of her ear and through her skull with the promise of something sharp underneath. The hay mites had eaten Cynthia up yet again, and yet again she was leveraging this to ask for a haircut to cull parasites she knew she had not contracted. Alice’s mother had combed through the coarse black strands of her hair with a look that suggested resigned disappointment. Alice had been expressly forbidden from cutting her hair as short as she would like to have it, ever since she was in kindergarten and attempted to chop her waist-length frou into the crew cut she envied of her cousin Pemberton with blunt tipped safety scissors. Her mother had spanked her ass with the wooden spoon until she was black and blue for that one and she hadn’t tried again.

Three years ago Alice had caught a bit of luck, something rare for weird backcountry girls in the boonies of Mississippi. 

Her favorite time of the day, post-school walks around her family property; kicking dirt clods, trailing through thickets and marsh with her fingers, bothering the horses, were being cut short for hay bailing season. As the oldest she was needed to help with the baler, piloting the clunky green monstrosity over the waist-deep grass. She imagines from above the trees her path over the field is graceful, like ice-skating, like a beige dandelion puff gliding along above it’s John-Deere-Green stem. Her younger siblings and cousins would be short little silhouettes in the distance, raking the cut grasses into neat rows for her to roll over with the machine. If she paid close attention, she could see them itching. Their hands were raking all over their backs and up and down their arms. Later that night, after dinner dishes had been cleaned and Alice was doing her homework at the kitchen table, her younger brothers and sister were sitting in their underwear on the bathroom floor getting their heads buzzed with her father's clippers. Cynthia was crying. 

“Hope y’all’ve learned your lesson. If I catch you playing in the hay barn again you’re getting switches.”

Though Cynthia had been devastated by losing her long black hair (and their gaggle of brothers nonplussed entirely), Alice had immediately felt the licks of jealousy, hot as hellfire, under the soles of her feet in the bathroom as the two sisters got ready for school. 

“Stop staring, Alice!” Cynthia shrieked, smacking her older sister in the arm with the pink bucket hat she was about to put on. There was a big fake flower on it that scratched Alice’s arm a bit. She felt bad for Cynthia, she did, but she wanted what her sister had with a covetousness that the pastor can probably smell all the way in town. The next day after school, Alice pretended to work on algebra at the kitchen table while she tracked her mother’s chores throughout the house. Watched her pink arms as they swept the kitchen floor and chopped carrots for dinner. Her feminine processes that Alice was supposed to observe and grow into, study carefully, reproduce without error. When she was sure that her mother’s eyes were cast in the vicinity, she gave her scalp a vigorous and lengthy scratch (she had even put a dab of Cythia’s hair glop into her hair and let it dry overnight, so that there was flaky shit to fall onto her shoulders). 

After the third or fourth pass, Alice caught her mother’s attention.

“Mary Alice! Come here and let me see your head.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She leaned over and rested her face against her mother’s bosom, hot and a bit damp. Her blouse, which she had owned since Alice was a small child, smelled warm and soft.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph you’ve got those hay mites too. You’re too old to be playing in hay!”

“No ma’am, I wasn’t, I was driving the baler! I must’ve gotten them from Cynthia. We shared a towel.”

Her mother took a contemplative pause, running her fingers through Alice’s long black hair before it stopped at a messy braid.

“Such a shame for you two. A woman’s hair is her glory. I suppose it’ll grow back before you graduate.” 

Alice managed to squeeze out a few tears and throw a few hoarse, half-hearted protests, trying to fight down the corners of her mouth. Later, with her toothbrush sticking out of her mouth like a tree limb, Alice scraped back all her hair and pulled it as tight as she could. She couldn’t sleep that night for the excitement. 

“Stop, Alice! I can hear you doing it!” Cynthia screamed at her, pushing against Alice’s arm at the bus stop. It was still dark outside and the stars were just beginning to dim as the sun pushed upwards from the Earth. Their stop was at the end of the country road that connected their property to the highway, and between the sparse trees and even sparer cars, every breath between the siblings was audible. Alice had not been able to stop rubbing the palm of her hand over her prickly scalp.

“Oh, fuck off Cyndy. Put your headphones on, then.” Cynthia rolled her eyes but reached into her backpack to pull out the brand new Walkman that she had gotten for her fourteenth birthday three weeks ago. Their younger brothers would not get on the bus to Our Lady for another hour and the house lay dark and silent behind them save for the kitchen light that they had forgotten to shut off in their haste. In the dim above the hill, the twin eyes of the school bus searched out for the two girls, and found them by the mailbox that was painted ‘BRANDON’. 

Alice had managed to keep her mite deception up all through the spring, summer, and fall, but as winter came and put the grass to sleep in the fields, she realized that there were to be no more haircuts for the foreseeable future. The mites were dead and would not be a threat until the spring. No lice were spreading around, either, so she knew her mother would be too suspicious to fall for it (Alice was sure that she had started to catch on). She would have to let her hair grow in again, despite the pangs in her chest at the realization. She loved the way her jaw looked, the way she didn’t have to fuss over herself in the morning, the way her body looked without it draping over her shoulders. 

To pick out Cynthia’s birthday present, Alice’s mother and father drove her into Biloxi to visit the tech store at Edgewater Mall. She wore her brother’s jeans (“They’re the only clean pair I can find!”), a long sleeve t-shirt, and a rugby shirt over that. Combined with her hair, Alice couldn’t stop looking at herself in the mirror. She felt...something. It was hot in her stomach, and she could feel the burn into her face and down her legs, curling, drawing her attention. She’d never particularly cared for how she looked: she didn’t have much of a say in it as it was. Mother picked out her clothes and cut her hair. But now, as she had gone into high school and the younger siblings had become more of a priority, Alice was able to sneak under the radar relatively unscathed. Cousin Pem’s old clothes, hands sprung into her pockets, rocking back on her heels and scratching the back of her neck, she would not be recognizable as Mary Alice Brandon, the hick girl from the boonies outside of town. When Alice was younger the rich girls from Biloxi used to throw her in the garbage bins behind the cafeteria and pass obscene love notes to thick-necked, football throwing boys in homeroom under her name. Meek, weird little Mary Alice, with the scruffy uniforms and the worn out sneakers, wearing twin braids every day like Pippi Longstocking. 

As high school rolled around their new favorite way to torture her was to write ‘dyke’ on her locker in lipstick enough times that Alice learned the word intimately. The tall, proud ‘d’, the slinky ‘y’, the cage of the ‘k’ protecting little ‘e’. Elementary school Mary Alice was a tomboy: less than ideal, but acceptable. Her mother could reason away her cousin’s hand-me-downs and short hair as the practicalities of farm life, her love of the outdoors and muddy play normal for a girl with three younger brothers. As she got older, tomboy dropped away and was replaced with Alice, defective woman-child that drove everyone around her into rage with simple existence. Her crimes were laid out before her on a daily basis by her mother: no normal interest in boys, dressing wrong, walking wrong, talking too much, being a know-it-all, thinking she was better than everyone else, no respect for herself, no respect for the Bible, no respect for the Church, no respect for how people  _ talk _ about their family now. 

She couldn’t for the longest understand  _ how _ she was doing all of those things just by being herself. By freshman year Alice still didn’t quite know what dyke even meant-- she knew it was meant as a curse. It was supposed to crush her, make her feel subhuman and dirty, she knew that. Mid-october, after scrubbing “Mary Alice munches muff” off the mirror in the A-Hall bathroom, Alice had a lark to finally unlock it during study hall. The closest she could find in the dictionary was ‘dike,’ an embankment for controlling or holding back water. She did not have a point of reference, but this was obviously not it. The library encyclopedia set said much the same, but the cover was peeling off, and there was mildew and mold growing in the back spine from past floods of the library. The dictionary wasn’t in much better shape, or any younger-- both books had been published in the mid seventies. This took her to the library in town and it’s bank of public computers. The Brandon’s didn’t have one of their own yet, and Alice certainly wasn’t going to ask her father to use the one in his office in town.

Alice can’t control the paranoid urges to constantly check behind her as she begins her search. The table has three desktops lined up on it and no one else at either one, but she’s scared that someone from the United Daughters of the Confederacy will come tottering up behind her and ask about her mother’s dues. She uses her body to block the screen, leaning in close. The hum from the monitor and tone of the dial up bubbles into her bones and froths behind her eyes. Her head feels fizzy and hot. 

Merriam-Webster says: DYKE ( _ noun _ ). Usually offensive. LESBIAN. 

Someone’s arm brushes her upper back, and she startles so hard she closes the window before she means to. The screen is warm and Alice can feel the screen static in the peach fuzz on her cheek.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Psst.”

Alice feels the whisper of air against the back of her jumper more than she hears the whisper. Connor Catreux, the fat, juice-spittin boy who wore a Confederate belt buckle and shit-stained muck boots with his school uniform, was trying to pass her something. She pretended to not hear him.

“Psst. Hey. Hey!”

“What?” Alice whipped around and whispered, hot. Connor was trying to slide a folded piece of notebook paper from the armrest of his desk on to her own. She knew the drill. She caught it with her elbow and slid it slowly until it was sitting in front of her on the desk. Usually, these studyhall notes cycled between a few different themes: “____ thinks ur cute and wants u-- do u like him? Circle y or n,” to try and get her to fall into the obvious trap of getting laughed at by a greasy boy in the room. Then there was “____ says that ur fukin ugly ha ha ha” to try and gode her into some sort of crying fit. The third type, as she could tell this was, were usually vile. Once, Britt Blackman had drawn a stick figure cartoon of Alice with a dick in her mouth, and the shock and disgust must have been clearly evident on her face because his friends sitting behind and in front of her burst into laughter.

This packet was a list. All of the girls in Alice’s homeroom were listed on one side of a table-- on the other, columns with the name of each boy in the class. They were ranking the girls on a scale of 1-10. She didn’t expect anything complimentary, or kind. She assumed it was going to be insulting and cruel. 

She expected it to be bad, and it still hammered into her chest and hung there like a heavy carpenters nail. In her column, the boys of the class had written “Kill yourself!!”, “-1000000,” and “ugly dyke”. Britt Blackman, the clever artist, had even sketched a small cartoon Alice slitting her wrists with a pencil. She had a mustache and piercings added to her lip and ears. Alice tried to school her face into placidity and indifference as she had a thousand times before. Her lower lip quivered. Her face grew unbearably hot, and spicy, pricking tears budded at her eyes. She raised her hand and waited for Mrs. Catrel to notice. 

“Yes?”

“May I use the restroom, ma’am?” She said. Her voice sounded high and tight. A low, nearly inaudible chorus of snickers rumbled behind her back. Her throat tightened. 

“You may. Grab the pass.”

Alice shot out into the hallway, barely grabbing the pass off the wall. It was a wooden spoon with a rubber plunger attached to one end, and hit the door frame with a hollow clank that drew eyes to her once again. Once in the hall, an egg-shaped sob wriggles out of her throat. She slaps her hands over her mouth and rushes, blinded by tears now, into the bathroom. In a small act of mercy, no one is inside, and she leans against the sink. This is Alice’s favorite bathroom to cry in-- there are windows up above the stalls, and the light hits the tiles and the chrome sink fixtures beautifully. She leans over the sink to get a drink of water from the tap. Across from her, two red-rubbed brown eyes with clotted lashes look back. Her freckles are liver colored under the flush from hairline to collarbones. She looked a mess. Her hands go to her hair, short as ever, sticking up in tufts and oil black. There was a painful zit right on her hairline that had been bugging her all day. Her school uniform hung a hideous polyester sack over her body. She wanted to die.

Grabbing her backpack out of her locker calmly, Alice set out the door with no hesitation, and no one stopped her. It’s perfectly likely no one even noticed that she left, or cared if they did. The lady at the front desk made eye contact with her over the phone headset and looked away. 

She had no plan. Underneath the throbbing there was a numbness that was buzzing in her inner ears and moving her forward. Something flickering, like a strobe light, started beneath each blink. On the hot black asphalt of the parking lot Alice swayed with the force of the nausea. There was a dream happening in real time. The bright colors made her head spin and the smells of pine and river water mixed with gasoline repugnantly. There was a girl-- she was seeing her, she was there. A girl like her, maybe, a not-girl. Boy’s clothes and a bad attitude. Stubbing out what looked like a cigarette into the parking space of a gas station. Alice couldn’t recognize the name-- it wasn’t one they had in Mississippi. She’d never even seen the logo before. The girl’s hair was greasy and her eyes were sunken into sallow skin, like her bad day had already lasted a few weeks. There was a name Alice could almost taste. It bounced around her synapses, evading capture the harder she tried to pin it down. She swayed and starred in the parking lot with trucks on either side of her, caked in dust from muddin, diffusing into the air and the damp heat. In the other space beyond herself, the girl throws up onto the sidewalk next to her, and the man walking a few feet away turns back in disgust. Alice doesn’t realize that she is doing the same until she tastes it in her own mouth. 

Later that night, when Alice is laying in bed and Cynthia is snoring gently, she thinks about what she saw. The girl on the sidewalk wasn’t a dream, she couldn’t be. Alice had heard somewhere that the human brain was only capable of dreaming of things that it had seen before, and she had certainly never seen another girl like that in her life. She was someone real and alive in the world. Somewhere. Alice couldn’t help but to smile.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 1997

Bella Swan had thought that she hit rock bottom in Phoenix, or at the very least,  _ a  _ bottom. She remembered her Grandma at the kitchen table, swirling a Maker’s Mark in a highball glass with a gold rim, cigarette in her other hand, taking a puff before saying “When you hit rock bottom, grab your fucking shovel and keep digging. When it gets too hot, you’re in hell. Or Phoenix.” She’d let out some of her drag with a loud, gruff laugh that descended into bronchial coughing. Renee would often leave her at Grandma’s after school to go on dates, and Bella slept there on the fold-out couch most weekends. Grandma Marie wasn’t exactly warm, and more often than not she chain-smoked and watched game shows, but Bella liked her alright. She was able to sleepwalk through school, and her mindless afternoons were spent with Grandma watching  _ Maury _ and eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch and helping her play her handheld poker game.

Now, Grandma had been dead for a little over two months. Her shabby one bedroom house had been sold for pocket money, and Bella was now filling her afternoons with the shitty pot she could score from Melvin and tapes she palmed from the music store at the mall. Renee was with Phil so often they barely crossed paths, though occasionally Bella would see her in the kitchen before school, swooping in through the front door with her sunglasses on and the same clothes she left with. That had been fine enough for the first few months, but the novelty of absolute freedom was wearing paper thin and Bella was sinking. If she didn’t make sure the bills went out on time, the electricity would not be on, there would be nothing to eat, and Renee wouldn’t even notice for days at a time because she was never there. If she didn’t sweep the floors, or clean the bathrooms, they would remain as-is, and even for a teenager a certain level of filth becomes unlivable. She learned how to sew after her cords caught on a nail sticking out of the front doorway, and there was no money to replace them. Before, though lonely and uninterested in school, her grades had been good. Good enough that she was hoping to get a scholarship to college somewhere green and cold and far, far away. Now they were dipping, and she was finding it harder and harder to care.

The 7/11 on Barstow Ave was the only one she could still go to-- she had shoplifted too many times from the other, closer locations but nothing was going to get between her and her afterschool ritual of blue Slushie, Corn Nuts, and magazines. She liked to purchase the snacks first, so that the cashier would let her linger by the magazine rack longer. She couldn’t always afford one, but looking was essential. Dolly Parton was on the cover of  _ Out _ last month and she hadn’t been able to buy it, and she wouldn’t miss out again. 

“Hey kid, you can’t keep coming in here and reading without paying. I’m gonna call my boss.” 

Bella held up her hand in a placating gesture, ten dollar bill between her first and second fingers. 

“Calm down, man, I’m gonna buy one.”

The kid backs down but eyes her suspiciously. She smiles with half her mouth, backing up with her hands outstretched. If she was going to steal, she certainly wouldn’t make herself so obvious about it. As it turned out, they hadn’t restocked issues for the month yet anyways, and the only Slushie flavors this place had were Red and Cola, so the walk had been a complete bust. She was going to have to take the bus to get home, or score a ride from Renee on the off chance that she was home. Rides, at least, were her way of making up for the benign neglect. Bella got a candy necklace and a Butterfinger and broke her bills for quarters. The payphone ate three before she was able to dial.

“Hello?”

“Hey mom. Can you give me a ride back from 7/11?”

“Isn’t it Monday? Why aren’t you in school?”

“It’s 6:00pm, school’s been out for like two hours.” 

There’s rustling on the other line. Renee is either tucking the headset between her shoulder and her chin and painting her nails with the other hand, or smoking a cigarette and moving the headset around between her hands.

“I’m sorry sweetheart, I really am, but Phil and I are going away for the weekend. Didn’t I tell you that already? I know I did.” 

Bella can’t help but laugh a little bit. It’s not that it’s unexpected, not in the slightest. It’s more that she still has the capability to be disappointed. 

“Ok. Guess I’ll see you Monday then.” 

“We’ll bring you back something nice from Sedona baby! There’s money on the counter for pizza,” and with that Bella hung up the phone. She was entirely certain that there would, in fact, not be money for pizza on the counter. She kicks at the sand around the payphone a bit, digging in the toe of her shoe. She’s wearing a ratty flannel shirt over a t-shirt over a long-sleeved tee and it’s over 86 degrees in the shade. Her pants are big enough to hang low on her hips and a sliver of her stomach catches a breeze. She, thank god, has just enough cash to pay for the bus fare to her neighborhood. She sits down on the bench outside of the Safeway and waits.

  
  
  



End file.
